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One of the most exciting things about our conversion to the Finanical Edge was the integration with The Raiser's Edge. However, there have been some issues in getting this to work. We are heavy users of Projects in FE (ie., we have alot of projects and most of our reports are project-centric).
When our RE gifts post, they post to two differnt projects: one for the debit and one for the credit. It appears as if RE assumes you are posting the debit and credit to the same project. This does not work for us. Has anyone else run into the same problem? How did you get around it?
I'm hoping the next release of RE in February will resolve this.
__________________ Joe Sullivan
Data Systems Administrator
Great Commission Ministries
At the 2006 conference, the developers mentioned that the way products used to be developed was in complete isolation. There was a RE team and a FE team. They didn;t much speak to each other. The integration was developed as an afterthought.
It is my understanding that this model has changed, bringing integration, and uniformity across products in the 7x platform to a much higher priority than it has been in the past.
__________________ Peter Gulka
Chief Bus Driver
Blackbaud User Society www.blackbus.org
Yes, I spoke to them as well about this. They were a little surprised that the integration didn't support different projects for the debit and credit at the current state. I'm very much looking forward to more tightly integrated systems.. and of course, Infinity.
__________________ Joe Sullivan
Data Systems Administrator
Great Commission Ministries
When our RE gifts post, they post to two differnt projects: one for the debit and one for the credit. It appears as if RE assumes you are posting the debit and credit to the same project. This does not work for us. Has anyone else run into the same problem? How did you get around it?
When I took FE training many years ago, they said that FE projects correspond to RE funds. Since any one split in RE can only have one RE fund, both the debit and the credit for that split will go to the same FE project. You could set up different funds for the debit and credit in the GL distributions, but the project would have to be the same.
Given this stated correlation between RE Funds and FE Projects, it's unlikely that this will be fixed in future releases of either.
Drew
__________________ J. Drew Allen
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Crystal Reports and SQL Server Consultant
It is better to live your destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.
We've just started going down the path of "future" integration.
in RE therre is:
Project(hidden field - only "active" if your FE GL is marked as present) & Fund ID
Gift type 1 (cash) ............Credit # Debit #
Gift type 2 (pay cash)........Credit # Debit #
etc....
So the first thing we've done in RE is to make the FUND ID the same as the project id.
then added the applicable credit & debit numbers for the different types of gifts.
Since our projects are "blanK" we can't use the GL posting report so I created a custom Crystal to send to the business office that accompanies our deposit - any gift that is not marked as "posted" appears in this report.
There are a couple of options in RE for the GL interface - and since we've not got that far I'm not sure as to the details on how to set that up - but I get the impression that you can customize it somewhat to fit your needs; Could you enter different credit & debit #s in the RE fund table and then interface with the GL using the custom layout?
I'm just now getting my feet wet in FE - so if I"m way off base - I apologize.
__________________ Elaine Tucker Stewardship Coordinator St. Mark's School of Texas USA www.smtexas.org
We integrate RE and FE also. We have a lot of projects and they directly correlate with funds in RE. The name is the same. We use different debit and credit GLs but the same fund. This is set up in the GL distribution on the Fund in RE. We mostly debit the cash account and credit the revenue accounts.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say your projects are "blank". On the gift processing side, we produce a commit report, a batch validation report and a posting report. We also tally the batches gifts as well as have a master deposit report that is built from the batches. On the financial side, the posted batches come through as GL journal batches. This is reviewed by our finance department before being processed into FE. Everything is balanced to the daily mail totals and then to the deposit.
I love the integration between the products. The hardest part is balancing the bank req as far as the credit cards are concerned.
__________________ Nora Isaac
Senior Manager Information Technology
The ALS Association, Greater Phila. Chapter www.alsphiladelphia.org
the "project field" in RE is blank because we haven't told RE that there is a FE GL present. - seems to me that if that check box hasn't been checked then the projects field (availble in export) shouldn't be available.
I just wasn't in the mood to take that issue up with CS when I called them asking about importing projects into RE. (it was not available)....
__________________ Elaine Tucker Stewardship Coordinator St. Mark's School of Texas USA www.smtexas.org
RE and FE integration 
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